Your Permission Slip to the Epic Life

Here at Salty we’re about chasing the epic life. And chances are if you’ve landed here you share a similar yearning for a more fulfilling life but are awaiting some sort of sign or permission slip to get cracking.

Consider this your permission slip.

Salty Souls celebrates the ambitious, intelligent, switched on woman. But we also know, like us, the 2015 warrior goddess yearns for a deeper sense of purpose outside the Western consensus of a successful life.

If we have an honest conversation with ourselves chances are there’s some spiritual, creative or active outlet we’ve always been meaning to explore but have never quite got around to. Maybe we said we were going to start yoga ‘tomorrow’ and then a year and 365 tomorrows passed without us realizing. Maybe we wanted to get into meditation but couldn’t stop our minds racing so gave up. Maybe it goes beyond that, to wanting to buy a one-way plane ticket to a new life somewhere else, though you haven’t so much as booked a flight.

Why do we keep stopping as soon as we start, running out of steam halfway or putting the epic life off until tomorrow? Why don’t we spend more time connecting, creating, discovering and dreaming?

We live in a world saturated with these divine spoils but never let ourselves indulge for long… Why?

I think it comes down one thing, too little faith, and too much fear.

Fear we don’t deserve to lead the epic life.

Fear of failure.

Fear of death.

In an earlier post, Erika explains how Westerner’s are raised to be in a constant state of progression and perfection, in order to ACHIEVE MORE. This is why practices that have no general end-goal besides the pleasure of the action itself like yoga, surfing, and meditation, are often used once or twice and discarded by us monkey-minded. We don’t have a whole lot of patience if something doesn’t open itself up to us straight away.

On a larger scale, it’s the same with getting that one-way ticket to start a new life somewhere else. You’ll be asked what will be your plan once you get there ? how it fits into your “big scheme” ? how you’re going to measure its success ? … It’s as if we have to earn the right to partake in these adventures by succeeding at them and then having something to tangibly show for it.

Sound familiar? This voice in your head has told you you don’t deserve this life. Though we’d never keep a friend around who spoke to us this way, for some reason we just keep listening to this toxic voice in our heads that tells us the epic life is for others, not for us.

Too little faith, too much fear.

In her 2014 interview with Oprah, author of Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert brings the faith by saying; “For some reason, there’s huge swathes of women who never got the memo that their lives belong to them. And there’s this instinct that they need a permission slip from the principals office for anything.”

Here we go, and this is something I have to keep reading multiple times a day to help it really set in, Gilbert goes on to say:

You are allowed to ask yourself some really important questions about your life.

You are allowed to take accountability and ownership for your own journey.

you’re allowed to ask what serves you sometimes, because I know you’ve been trained up to serve everyone else.

You’re allowed to honour your own life that you were given.

If that’s not the permission slip you’ve been waiting for I don’t know what is. Have faith in these four affirmations, your doorway to the divine. Use them as your shield against the following buzzwords that will come when you’ve made your choice to begin your exploration into the sublime.

This life is YOURS and you are ALLOWED to do whatever the heck feels good and excites to you !!!

When you are called “irresponsible” and “crazy” for pursuing the epic life, know these words have as much substance as a puff of smoke. We always going to far for the ones that aren’t going anywhere…

When you find yourself telling yourself you are “selfish” and “self involved” remind yourself that you’re allowed to focus on yourself, your journey and what serves you as your god-given right.

And be ready for the inevitable glut of “hippie bullshit” comments, or an intro of your name followed by “she’s into crystals and all that voodoo shit.”

A little more faith, a little less fear.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond mesure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be ? Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightening about shrinking yourself so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do.

We are born to manifest the glory that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” – Marianne Williamson

Fear of death.

The days of our cavemen ancestors doing something different meant death. Our cavemen instincts scream at us: if I cut off my steady stream of income where will my next pay and as a result my next meal come from?

But let’s be real, we won’t starve. We may find ourselves collapsing on our parents couch eating cereal at some stage or another but we in all likelihood will not die from starvation.

Which brings us to our next point.

Fear of failure

Or fear of throwing it all to the wind only to wind up in a broken heap on our parents couch, eating their cereal and wondering where your respectable life path went. And it happens. In episode 12 of her podcast series Big Magic Liz Gilbert recounts a furious woman telling her that she’d quit her job, mortgaged her house, took loans and convinced people to follow her on a crazy risk. She jumped…

And the net didn’t catch her. The risk “failed” and the woman said she lost dignity, friends, and faith in the universe because she’d jumped and the net hadn’t caught her.

Let’s be clear: no one is telling you the universe is going to give you endless success because you finally had the balls to go “f*ck it”. No one is telling you that if you take the leap the success net will be there to catch you. That’s not what leading the epic life and dancing with inspiration is about.

But what it does promise to give you if you have the faith, is a life rich with inner and outer exploration, a life full of daily excitement, energy and connection. Have the faith that you’re working towards getting to wake up feeling like you’re part of the universe’s heartbeat, that you’re continually becoming closer to the source of your true inner purpose.

“This idea of; it was a success/ it wasn’t a success”. When did inspiration owe you anything? That wasn’t my understanding of the contract with inspiration. It owes you nothing, except the transcendence of the experience of working with it at all. That’s the only contract we have with inspiration. It wants to dance with you. And we want to dance with it and the result, that’s all human ego questions (see previous post). Inspiration doesn’t look at you and go ‘that didn’t work’. Inspiration goes: ‘that was fun, look at what we did!'”

If you succeed in the traditional sense, great, if you don’t, also great. That kind of thing is irrelevant really, when you get to feel like you’re living out your true purpose.

Faith destroys fear. If you have faith in what you are doing and your journey, there is nowhere for fear to live. Put your faith in the fact you deserve an epic life and just begin.